NTEL 4 G; 4 G LTE Mobile service by NTEL

According to the latest report on NATCOM; NATCOM Consortium, the new parent company of incumbent fixed line operator (NITEL) and its subsidiary Nigerian Mobile Telecommunications Limited (M-Tel), has plans to roll out 4G LTE services with a whopping $1.2 billion specifically mapped out to turn around the fortunes of first National carrier, NITEL, its assets and new owners. The New brand is NTEL

NTEL Real 4G

“NTEL will launch a pure play 4G LTE mobile services, the service will offer high speed data, high definition voice and video, the first phase of network roll out will begin with 800 sites, increasing to 2000 sites as we move on.

Data centre

‘We are also building tier 111 data centre which gives us opportunity to have double layer redundancy because with the capacity of this Data centre we are only allowed to have not more than 24 minutes down time in a year. However, we are ready to collocate with existing infrastructure by other operators and that helps to reduce our capital expenditure, CAPEX”.
The operator which legally acquired NITEL, its mobile arm MTEL and other assets last year, says it was aware of the massive investments existing operators have made and their strong holds in the market but promised to give a fight that would make it difficult for anybody to dismiss it in the history of Nigerian telecom development’.

Fixed network service

According to Abbas, ‘the company would roll out successful fixed network services because it has the right platform to make it thrive. According to him, the problem with others who have the license but have not been able to roll out the service was because they operate on 2G platform with a lot of subscribers squeezed into the small pipe the spectrum provides’.
He promised to make a total turnaround of the case because nTel was going to operate on the 4G platform which is spacious since it has no subscriber at the moment.
For him, “research findings of respected institutions like Pyramid and OVUM have stated that there is still space in the Nigerian market. According to these agencies; 200 – 230 million SIMs will be added to the market by 2019. This is an over 100 million increase from today’s figures as published by the NCC’.

Innovative and modern service

NATCOM will position itself smartly to harness the market by providing Innovative and modern service offerings as yet not seen in Nigeria. Roll out plans has been concluded and network equipment is currently being built for NATCOM by Ericsson and Huawei with a view to rolling out mobile services before the end of the year”.
The last statistics recorded by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) said that mobile operators in the country added 2.1 million new subscribers in June 2015.
According to the report, the total number of mobile subscribers had risen from 144 million in May 2015 to 146 million in June 2015. The stats revealed that GSM networks remained the key drivers of the Nigerian telecommunications industry as other operators contributed minimally to the surging growth of the subscriber base.

According to the report, subscriptions to fixed networks increased from 181,625 in May 2015 to 182,643 in June 2015; however, this is lower than the 187,028 subscribers recorded in June 2014. The total number of subscriptions to all telecommunications network in the country had risen from 146.56 million in the month of May to 148.8 million in June. This compares with 132.19 million in July 2014.

Meanwhile all telecommunications networks added 16.59 million lines or 12.54 per cent within the one-year period even as CDMA subscriptions increased marginally from 2.02 million in July 2014 to 2.11 million lines by the end of June 2015.